Dispatches from the Open-Source Front

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for open-source watchers, including announcements by Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, and speculation about Microsoft's and Apple's entry into this marketplace. Red Hat’s success with Linux distribution has made quite a splash. The stock, which had an initial public offering (IPO) in mid-August of $16, is still trading in the mid-$80s today. Red Hat just announced that it will create a portal for Linux development that will be a major part of its business. Red Hat just released version 6.1 of its distribution. Last week, the second of the Linux commercial OS distribution houses, VA Linux Systems, announced that it had filed for IPO under the stock-market acronym of LNUX. Sun has announced that it will begin to make its UNIX-based Solaris OS available for public download and modification. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the story at the end of September. According to WSJ, Sun is trying to imitate the success of Linux. Some news publications are calling this event the open sourcing of Solaris. However, if you examine the details of the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), you'll notice that it contains some interesting elements. Although Sun is pursuing a Linux-type business model, Sun’s community-source model differs from the more radical open-source model in several significant respects. Under the open-source model, anybody can download and modify the source code. As a result, you can incorporate the source code into any product. It is, for all intents and purposes, free to the public for any use. The open-source ethic encourages users who make any improvements to the source code to make those improvements available to the larger community. Sun’s community-source model is a hybrid of traditional, propriety code ownership and open-source distribution. Although Sun makes source code available for free download, you can't incorporate the source code into commercial products without Sun’s permission. In Sun’s words, community-source licensing creates a special hierarchy. At the top is the central company that distributes the source code, a developing organization, which in this case is Sun. The other component of the hierarchy is a cloud of companies and users who download and modify the source code, known as the community of participants. Although the community of participants can use programs built on the source code for free, Sun must be part of the deal when anybody in the community wants to distribute such software outside the community. The SCSL lets community participants retain intellectual property rights. While programming interfaces must remain open, any other work that a community participant performs on the source code is proprietary to that particular community participant. You can find Sun’s SCSL presentation online, but the Solaris source code was not available at the time of this article. In other news from the open-source front, Microsoft reportedly is considering open sourcing Windows CE. Last month, Microsoft reportedly killed this possibility, but industry insiders claim that the open-source possibility is back on the table. Rumors about Microsoft using an open-source model for some of its software have been persistent in the trade press, indicating that the idea might be under serious discussion at the top levels of management. Apple is also rumored to be considering open sourcing part of its OS, but neither Microsoft's or Apple's plans in this area have resulted in any announcements. Open-source development provides some compelling benefits. Generally, development moves faster and there is more experimentation with open-source software. Also, this model often creates a loyal developer and user base. The keeper of the code can also benefit by adopting the technology that appears to offer the most potential. Although Linux is clearly a hit with this model, open-source efforts by commercial players such as Netscape’s Mozilla Seamonkey project, which hopes to deliver a next-generation Web browser, have been plagued by slow development and bloated code. It remains to be seen whether players such as Sun, Microsoft, and Apple can use this development model to their advantage.

Discuss this Article 5

Brian Jepson (not verified)

on Oct 28, 1999

Your article states that there are rumors that Apple is releasing part of their OS as open source, but this was done some time ago:
http://www.publicsource.apple.com/
This is MacOS X, however, and not MacOS 8 or 9. They are very different things, and I don't think there are any plans to release the source for older MacOS versions.
You also mentioned Windows CE - even if Microsoft doesn't release it as open source, there are already efforts underway to bring Linux to CE devices. They have successfully booted the OS on SH3 and MIPS devices, and even run some user-space programs:
http://www.linuxce.org/

Mozilla started off slow and bloated because it was based on released Netscape sources (the product of closed development), not because it is open source. Since then, it's been through a ground-up rewrite, and is much less bloated. However, the mnemonic browser project, which has been open source from day one, is cleaner and clearer.

Regarding the Mozzila project:
You really should take a closer look at the web site, and see "why" there is a delay. The delay is not in dealing with bloated source per se, but instead dumping the bloated source in favor of starting from scratch. Some of the major articles on that site explain this in much greater detail. The final product which Mozzila.org will produce is something that the consumer has not seem before. It will be more like the familiar Russel Stover's Candies, in that a lot of the little buggers look the same, but there are a few that are really terrific on the inside. Similarly, Mozzila will have many of the features that the previous incarnation has (a la netscape), but the inside is a lot better than before. One of the major things which its boasts is a new layout engine called Raptor, and from direct personal experience with the milestone 10 release of Mozilla, there is a significant and noticable speed difference between netscape and mozzila (the latter I thought was at least 2X faster than the former). So please look at the site, and if possible make a correction to your article!

Thanks for the excellent article on open source software. I just had one little inaccuracy to point out. Although the Mozilla project has had some delays (namely because they scrapped the old codebase which was deemed unworkable and rewrote it from the ground up), it's not suffering from bloated code at all. Current download footprint for the entire win32 browser (including code and data) is 788k compressed. That's including browser, mail, news, and other stuff as well. You should try a recent milestone release or nightly build. It's stabilizing rapidly and more and more people are using it. The reason more people didn't flock to the project early on was because the code Netscape released wasn't usable. As Mozilla reaches feature complete and stablizes, more people will use it as their primary browser, which will result in more bugs found and fixed. It's kind of a snowball effect. When you release a _huge_ open source package that's badly broken and won't run at all, only a few hardcore people will work on it, but as it becomes more usable, more and more people will use it, accellerating the rate of bugs found and fixed.